Movie News After Dark: Three Amigos, Ender’s Game, The Royal Wedding and Existential Star Wars

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column. But would you say that El Column has a plethora of news items? Yes, yes, I know it has a lot of news items. But does it have a plethora?

Empire recently brought Martin Short, Chevy Chase and Steve Martin back together to recreate some of the Three Amigos magic that delivered one of the most underrated comedies of the last 25 years. Even director John Landis was on-hand for the photo shoot, celebrating the quarter decade anniversary of the film. It’s a personal favorite of mine, and part of my “cinematic friend litmus test.” If you don’t like this movie, we simply won’t ever be close friends. Them’s the rules.

Summit Entertainment has picked up the rights to a live-action adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s popular science fiction series Ender’s Game, a story of gifted kids who fight back against Earth’s alien overlords. Star Trek and Fringe dudes Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman are on to produce. Gavin Hood is on to direct. If what we know about Summit is true — they let their filmmakers and producers actual make the films — then we should get a solid result. Not like that Wolverine film Gavin Hood sort of directed.

Of course there will be movie pitches based upon the Royal Wedding. It’s one of the year’s hottest topics. What we didn’t expect is that it would come from the writing duo behind 500 Days of Summer. If all goes well, that’s one twisted modern royal romance.

Helen Hunt will play a sexual surrogate in The Surrogate, not to be confused with the Bruce Willis-led sci-fi film Surrogates. This one’s an independent production with John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone) as Mark O’Brien, a polio survivor who is paralyzed from the neck down and seeks out a sexual surrogate for his first ever sexual contact. It sounds interesting enough.

Here’s a strange one: Jeff Bridges is in talks to replace Zach Galifianakis in R.I.P.D. and star alongside Ryan Reynolds as an undead police office. Just the notion that these two men have been considered for the same role in a movie trips me out, man.

Either Kristen Wiig or Anna Faris or Community‘s Gillian Jacobs will star alongside Sacha Baron Cohen in The Dictator. It’s “the heroic story of a dictator who risked his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed. Cohen is said to play dual roles of a goat herder and a deposed foreign ruler who gets lost in the U.S.” So it needs someone with improvisational skills. I’m thinking Gillian Jacobs. Lets give the kid a chance. For your reference, here now is Ms. Jacobs:

Sony Pictures Animation has picked up Instant Karma, a film project from director Paul Hernandez that seems to have the worst luck of them all. It’s been bounced from three different studios even though it had sported a voice cast that included Gene Wilder. Amazing.

Hero Complex has a great interview with Dorothy Herrmann, the daughter of famed composer Bernard Herrmann, whose 100th birthday is being celebrated by the TCM Film Festival this coming weekend. Herrmann was responsible for so many classics that I dare not list any, lest I forget something important. His filmography and talent, as they come, is unmatched.

David Koepp will earn seven figures to rewrite Moscow, the next film in the Jack Ryan action series. The Jurassic Park and Mission: Impossible scribe will — as Paramount hopes — lay down the right words and actions to make Chris Pine the next big thing, as if being Captain Kirk wasn’t enough.

Peter Hall continues to deliver the goods in his Hollywood.com column For Your Consideration, giving movie nerds something outside the world of film to obsess over. In this latest edition, he has me wanting to watch The Killing. There goes my weekend…

Both Marvel and The Asylum will be putting out Thor films next week. How is this possible, you ask? Because Thor is one of those public domain heroes, free to be adapted by anyone with the means and the interest. And according to a report from io9, Thor isn’t the only public domain superhero. Looks like The Asylum has fodder for years to come.

Thanks to the support they’ve earned from the estate of Martin Luther King Jr., Dreamworks appears to be the only studio on the block that will actually make an MLK biopic. They’ve hired The Score writer Kario Salem to write the script. This comes just as Paul Greengrass’ Memphis project was dumped by Universal.

Tonight’s video finale is going to rock the world of the four of you who are dual agents in the worlds of nerdism and philosophyism. George Lucas and Jean-Paul Sartre present Existential Star Wars… (found via /Film)

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